Mandible movements during increasingly rapid articulations of single syllables: preliminary observations.

A previous study of mandible movements in normal speech [W.L. Nelson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 68, S32 (1980)] suggested that the speech motor control process resulted in a relationship between movement time, distance, and peak velocity which implied (1) some adaptation to the physical effort required for the movement, and (2) that the force limit effective during speech was considerably below that which the mandibular muscles are capable of producing. In the present study, mandible movements were measured during maximally rapid opening and closing tasks, and during increasingly rapid repetitions of a spoken syllable and a nonspeech "syllable." The results indicate that (1) peak acceleration levels for the repeated mandible movements were less than half of those for the maximally rapid single mandible movements, and (2) a rather different mode of control is used for the repeated speech movements as compared to the nonspeech movements.